William Bedwell and the King James Bible
2011 marks the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible. This article sets out to explain how the Bible was translated and to focus closely on the life of one of the translators, William Bedwell of Great Hallingbury.
The King James Bible was a major co-operative endeavour that required the efforts of dozens of the day's leading scholars. Indeed it has been called the only classic ever to be written by a committee. In 1604 at the Hampton Court Conference, which King James had convened to enable churchmen of all shades of opinion to discuss the future of Christianity in this country, the King agreed to commission a new translation of the bible that was acceptable to all parties. Fifty four translators were appointed and divided into six groups, with each group given a run of consecutive books of the Bible on which to work. Two of the companies met at Westminster, two at Oxford, and two at Cambridge. They were presided over by the Dean of Westminster and by the two Hebrew Professors of the Universities. Three companies were commissioned to translate the Old Testament, two companies were commissioned to translate the New Testament and one company was commissioned to translate The Apocrypha.
The King James Bible was meant to preserve some of the best lines from the translations that people already knew, primarily the Bishops’ Bible of 1568. Forty large unbound Bishops’ Bibles were prepared for the translators to mark. One of these marked Bibles still survives and is kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. But because many of the translators were skilled in both Hebrew and Greek, they also drew on new Hebrew and Greek sources to produce an agreed text.
The preliminary translation work took four years. This was followed by nine months of review and revision, carried out by a committee of twelve: two translators from each of the six panels, based on a detailed set of guidelines that was established to ensure that the translators' personal eccentricities and political prejudices were not included in this new version.
The King James Bible was developed to be read out loud at church services, so in light of this, the translators gave diligent attention to rhythm and punctuation to give the text a fresh oral quality that no other translations to date could match. For much of 1610 the translators listened to the product of their labours, as verse by verse, the bible was read out aloud in Stationers’ Hall, next to St. Paul’s Cathedral, before the final version was approved. The language had to be clear and had to flow; and it did! Because its translators strove for accuracy, beauty, power, and literal faithfulness to the Greek and Hebrew texts, the King James Bible was the book, which more than any other shaped the English language and formed the English mind.
The men selected as translators “sought the truth rather their own praise”, as stated in the preface to their work and were chosen as the best biblical scholars and linguists of their day. William Bedwell of Great Hallingbury certainly met these job specifications. Bedwell was baptised in St. Giles’ Church on 2nd October 1563, one of at least four children of John Bedwell, a small landowner and his wife, Anne. As a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, William showed interest in a wide range of subjects. He studied Mathematics, with the encouragement of his uncle, Thomas Bedwell, his father’s youngest brother. He was involved in a circle of scholars concerned with Biblical Studies and the study of Hebrew and he also began to concentrate on Arabic, a language little known in the west. At that time the connection between Mathematics and Arabic was very close and it was probably through Mathematics that Bedwell was first led to Arabic studies. As the most promising Arabist in England, he was occasionally employed as a translator of official documents and as an interpreter, meeting the Moroccan ambassadors to Queen Elizabeth who arrived in August 1600.
At Cambridge William Bedwell met Dr. Lancelot Andrewes, the great Anglican divine, with whom he was subsequently on terms of intimate friendship. On 8 December 1601 Bedwell was made rector of St Ethelburga, Bishopsgate, in London. In 1604 Andrewes, now Dean of Westminster Abbey, chose Bedwell as one of the translators of the Bible, and he served on the committee of ten which met at Westminster to translate the first twelve books of the Old Testament from Genesis to 2nd Kings. We know very little about how the members of the Westminster Committee carried out their work, except that they met in The Jerusalem Chamber, next to the Abbey.
In October 1607 Andrewes presented Bedwell with the vicarage of Tottenham High Cross in Middlesex, where he took up residence with his wife, Marsie (Mary) Chipperfield, whom he had married in the 1590s, and their four daughters, and officiated at the church of All Hallows. Bedwell's reputation was now at its height. Renowned as one of the few Arabists in northern Europe, he had become an object of pilgrimage for an international group of scholars. Towards the end of 1608 he was approached by a young Dutch scholar, Thomas Erpenius, who had just graduated at the University of Leiden and had decided to study Arabic. Bedwell gave him his first lessons. Erpenius was to be the finest Arabist of his generation and the first professor of Arabic at Leiden. Another of Bedwell’s pupils was Edward Pococke, whom he introduced to Archbishop William Laud. As a result of this introduction, the Archbishop appointed Pococke the first Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford. In 1612 Bedwell made his only recorded journey abroad, travelling to Leiden University in Holland to consult some Arabic manuscripts and to meet Arabic scholars.
Bedwell’s published and unpublished work demonstrates clearly the wide range of his intellectual interests. In 1612 he published an edition of the Epistles of St. John in Arabic and in 1615 he published a book about the Koran. He also left many Arabic manuscripts to the University of Cambridge, including the manuscripts of an Arabic Dictionary, on which he had been working for many years, and a font of type for printing them. Another manuscript for a Dictionary of Persian came to be in the possession of Archbishop William Laud and now resides at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Bedwell also published five books relating to Mathematics, including a book which explained the slide rule invented by his uncle, Thomas Bedwell (c.1547-1595). In 1631 Bedwell published his “Description of the Parish and Antiquities of Tottenham High Cross”. This was the first parish history to be printed and in consequence occupies an important place in English Local History studies.
William Bedwell seems to have been a modest and retiring man, who seemed happiest in the society of his family. King James had rewarded many of the translators of the 1611 King James’ Bible by bestowing good livings on them, as vacancies occurred, and by ecclesiastical promotion. Bedwell’s friendship with Andrewes and Laud and his own reputation would have enabled him to have had high preferment in the Anglican Church, had he wished. He surprised his contemporaries, however, by declining the opportunities for advancement and spending his life as a country vicar in Tottenham, caring for his parish and dedicating himself to scholarship. His son-in-law, John Clark, husband of his youngest daughter, Margaret, described Bedwell as “humble and void of pride, ever ready to impart his knowledge to others.”
William Bedwell died in his vicarage on 5th May 1632 at the age of 70 and was buried five days later alongside his mother in the chancel of Tottenham Church. Later his wife and daughters were buried there also. During the 1878 restoration of the church the inscribed stone covering his grave was removed and destroyed. The memorial to his daughter, Margaret, states that her father was “for the Eastern tongues, as learned a man as most lived in these modern times.” However the greatest memorial to Bedwell must be his published books, his manuscripts preserved at Cambridge University, but most of all his contribution to the King James Bible, a book born out of political and religious disagreement, and yet the world’s best selling book, a pillar of English culture and an instrument of faith for four hundred years.
Philip Hays (Organist St Giles)
